1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to computer security and in particular to spam detection.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic messaging has become a primary means of communication for many individuals and businesses. However, the increased use of electronic messaging has been accompanied by an increase in electronic unsolicited commercial messages, or “spam.” Spammers abuse electronic messaging systems by harvesting or deducing electronic message addresses and sending spam to those addresses. For example, spammers can use “scavenger bots” to gather email addresses from mail-to links on web pages and from other locations, and then send spam emails to those addresses.
In order to reduce or eliminate the problem of spam, messaging clients or servers conventionally depend on spam filters that detect and remove spam from the messaging stream. Traditionally, spam filters determine whether a given message is spam based on the content of the message. For example, the creator of the spam filter can use spam trap applications such as “honeypots” to receive spam messages so that the messages' content can be examined and used to create spam filters.
However, spammers are developing increasingly sophisticated techniques for evading spam filters. As a result, it is increasingly difficult to create spam filters that use message content to detect spam and have an acceptable rate of false positive and false negative detections. Therefore, there is a need for improved spam-detection techniques.